The story of _Venus and Tannhäuser_, bowdlerised as _Under the Hill_--by which Beardsley slyly means what he calls the Venusberg, for even Beardsley feared to _write_ the Mons Veneris,--he seemed undecided as to which to call it--the story was without consequence, without cohesion, without unity; it was the laboured stringing together of little phrases, word pictures of moods, generally obscene moods and desires such as come to plague a certain type of consumptive whose life burns at fever heat in the troubled blood. We know from Arthur Symons that Beardsley was for ever jotting down passages, epithets, newly coined words, in pencil in odd moments during this month at Dieppe. He gives us a picture of Beardsley, restless, unable to work except in London, never in the least appealed to by nature. Beardsley never walked abroad; Symons never saw him look at the sea. When the night fell, Beardsley came out and haunted the casino, gazing at the life that passed. He loved to sit in the large deserted rooms when no one was there--to flit awhile into the room where the children danced--the sound of music always drew him to the concerts. He always carries the inevitable portfolio with him and is for ever jotting down notes. He writes in a little writing room for visitors. He agonises over a phrase--he pieces the over-polished sentences and phrases together like a puzzle, making them fit where best they can. He bends all his wits to trying to write verse. He hammers out the eight stanzas of _The Three Musicians_ with infinite travail on the grassy ramparts of the old castle, and by dogged toil he brings forth the dainty indecencies, as later he chiselled and polished and chiselled the _translation from Catullus_. The innate musical sense of the fellow gives the verse rhythm and colour. But Beardsley failed, and was bound to fail, in literature, whether in verse or prose, because he failed to understand the basic significance of art. He failed because he tried to make literature an intellectual act of mimicry instead of an emotional act--he failed because all academism is a negation of art, because he mistook craftsmanship as the end of art instead of the instrument for emotional revelation. As Symons puts it, “it was a thing done to order,” in other words it was not the child of the vital impulse of all art whatsoever, he could not or did not create a make-believe whereby he sought to transmit his emotions to his fellows, for he was more concerned with trying to believe in his make-believe itself. It was not the child of emotional utterance, like his drawings--it was a deliberately intellectual act done in a polished form. We feel the aping of Wilde, of Whistler, of the old aphorists, like Pope, of the eighteenth century Frenchman. He uses his native tongue as if it were obsolete, a dead language--he is more concerned with dead words than with live. He tries to create a world of the imagination; but he cannot